A measure of our arrogance

Two items from Kyodo News (Japan) via Japan Today for October 7, the first from Pakistan.

Islamabad - Two bombs that exploded at a gathering of Islamic radicals in the central Pakistan city Multan early Thursday killed at least 35 people and wounded scores more, Pakistan's private GEO TV reported.

Earlier, the Associated Press, quoting local police, said the blasts came as hundreds of people gathered in a residential outside the city to mark the anniversary of the death of a leader of the outlawed Islamic group Sipah-e-Sahaba. GEO said most of the dead and injured were Sunni Muslims attending a memorial for Maulana Azam Tariq, a slain Sipah-e-Sahaba leader.

The other from Malaysia.

Kuala Lumpur - A Bangkok-bound Malaysia Airlines plane was grounded Tuesday after maintenance staff found some electrical wires in the cockpit were tampered with, The Star newspaper reported Thursday.

It marks the third such incident reported by the national air carrier since October last year. The Airbus A330 plane had arrived from Dhaka at 4 a.m. on Tuesday and was due to fly to Bangkok at 10 a.m. the same day when the maintenance crew found the tampered wires while carrying out preflight tests just two hours before the flight time.

Just who the flaming hell are we to go strutting pompously around the world, accusing, lecturing, condescending, acting like no one else - except, of course, the Israelis - understands the experience of terrorism?

Who are we to tell Pakistan, Malaysia, Germany (Red Army Faction, aka Baader-Meinhof Gang), Italy (Red Brigades), Spain (Basque separatist group Eta), even the UK (IRA, Ulster Defense Association), and other governments that we have insights which they lack?

Who are we to even hint to the people of Argentina, of Guatemala, of El Salvador, of Chile, of so many others that they have not got our understanding of living under the threat of terror? Who are we even to compare our daily experience to what they survived?

So again, just who the flaming hell do we think we are?

Footnote: On a completely different point but also prompted by the two items above, I was much more struck by the second one than by the first. I've been trying to figure out why. For some reason, tampering with the wires of an airplane seemed, for lack of a better term, colder, icier, an action of greater calculated cruelty than making and placing a bomb. Since I have no idea how big the plane is or how many passengers and crew would be on it, it can't be the number of potential deaths and injuries. So what is it?

Maybe, I thought, it's because when a bomb goes off it's wham! and it's happened, while going down in a plane can go on for agonizing minutes before the bloody denouement. But that just didn't feel like the reason.

Maybe it's because while a bomb can be assembled in any hidden location, tampering with wires in the cockpit has to be done right there; it requires access to the cockpit and so a degree of surreptitiousness not required for the other. Or maybe, going the other way, it's because making a bomb takes a conscious, focused effort, but tampering with wires could be almost casual, a quick yank when no one is looking, done in a manner almost indifferent to the havoc that could result.

That last suffers from a practical defect: If you want to sabotage the plane, you don't want to pull just any wires, you want to tamper with ones that will affect it in-flight. That requires knowledge and deliberate choice. But still, it feels the closest. And in fact in the course of writing this I've thought of another aspect which ties in with that: Sabotaging a plane is also more indiscriminate, more random. A bomb can be targeted - as, indeed, the one in the item from Pakistan appeared to be targeted at Sunni Muslims. But bringing down a plane means bringing down whoever happened to be on it when it went up and underneath when it went down. You have no target beyond "whoever I can get." Even if you say your target is some government, on a human scale, the impact is the same.

Now, please, don't anyone tell me that I'm saying bombings are okay as long as they're aimed at a particular target. I'm not. Nowhere near. I'm just trying to work out my own feelings about this, why one item struck me harder than the other.

And by the way, yes, I realize that the item about the tampered wires doesn't actually say the tampering was deliberate and doesn't actually say it could cause the plane to crash if uncorrected. I'm accepting the implication of the report for the sake of exploring some thoughts about terrorism.